Art in the Age of Franchising

It hurts to pose the question. “Friday Night Lights,” the NBC series about a high-school football team, is a luminous slow dance set in the smoldering landlock of fictional Dillon, Tex. Like a late-life romance, it induces both grief and euphoria and casts a kind of high-lonesome bluegrass spell. I love “Friday Night Lights.”

And it’s not just me. Grown-ups cry — DVR-owning grown-ups especially, according to Media Life magazine — while watching “Friday Night Lights.” They also pine for more and deeply dread the show’s extinction.

At the upfront presentations in Manhattan last spring, when the networks announced their new shows in New York, NBC took a principled position: in spite of the show’s mediocre ratings, fans, critics and even network suits had come to need “Friday Night Lights.” The network renewed the fledgling show, and since then, its survival has become small but meaningful evidence that goodness exists in prime time. (If the writers’ strike doesn’t end, the show’s second season will end in February.)

You can speculate about the American people and why they might reject a character-driven drama, a demographically eclectic cast or the complexity of the show’s moral vision, but “Friday Night Lights” has not even one intrinsic flaw — a grating performance, clunker dialogue, far-fetched plotting — that might cost it viewers.

From the first stunning episode on Oct. 3, 2006, during which the golden-boy quarterback Jason Street ends up paralyzed, the show has also made increasingly cruel demands of everyone who has fallen in love with it. Viewers have to keep watching or the show might die. And to NBC’s bottom-liners, “Friday Night Lights” must seem like a charity case they never should have adopted. If they cut it loose now, or after the strike ends, fans would rend garments, perhaps stage a boycott.

All the while, the show is a bona fide washout. Six or so million people watch “Friday Night Lights,” compared with around 13 million for NBC’s hit “Heroes.” No single episode has ever broken the Top 50 most-viewed prime-time shows. In popularity, it lags far behind “Dancing With the Stars,” “Deal or No Deal” and “The Bachelor.” Even now that the Nielsen ratings try to account for viewers who digitally record a show and watch it within a week of its air date (affluent viewers, perhaps?), the show’s numbers are lousy.

The fault of “Friday Night Lights” is extrinsic: the program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise. It is not and will never be “Heroes,” “Project Runway,” “The Hills” or Harry Potter. It generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms. There will be no “Friday Night Lights: Origins,” and no “FNL Touchdown” for PlayStation.

This may sound like a blessing, but in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

Photo

Credit
Kevin Van Aelst

This is an enormous social shift that coincides with the changeover from analog to digital modes of communication, the rise of the Internet and the new raucousness of fans. It’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture. In fact, rhizome art is both lower-brow (“American Idol,” Derek Waters’s “Drunk History”) and more avant-garde (“Battlestar Galactica,” Ryan Trecartin’s “I-Be Area”) than linear, author-controlled narrative, which takes its cues from the middle-class form of the novel.

With “Friday Night Lights,” however, there are no shoots; the exquisite episodes are all you get. The show, which is inspired by the 1990 book by H. G. Bissinger and Peter Berg’s 2004 movie of the same name, ferociously guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity. It shuts fans out. Even though NBC .com offers plenty of streaming video — whole episodes, as well as tightly produced hagiographies of the show’s actors — no independent “Friday Night Lights” wiki has formed on the Web to rival the “Heroes Wiki,” “Lostpedia” and the polyglot “Battlestar Wiki.” Nor has “Friday Night Lights” inspired any significant body of fan fiction (viewer-written stories that take off on the canon), though at the outset a few viewers eagerly awaited an outpouring of “slash” fan fiction (chronicles of hypothetical romances between male characters) from a football show.

Perhaps the characters’ motives and futures are too haphazard and lifelike to be guessed at by fans. Perhaps the “Friday Night Lights” narrative lacks a set of logical givens, the kind that are a staple of sci-fi and fantasy, which empower fans to speculate about outcomes. Perhaps the series is like fine embroidery or precise machinery: it extinguishes the desire in laypeople to try it themselves. It’s possible that “Friday Night Lights” even brings on museum fatigue, a sense of uselessness and enervation in the face of art that doesn’t need us.

Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art — at least when it takes the form of prime-time TV. They won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the shows fans profess to love of attention, and thus money, and thus life. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings.

As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.

With television at a crossroads and studio oligopolies looking mighty suspicious, the object lesson of “Friday Night Lights” — no production is an island, entire of itself — should be as plain as its allure.

CAN’T LOSE: Ninety-nine Amazon reviewers give the first-season DVDs of “Friday Night Lights” an average of five stars, the site’s max. Amazon Unbox also lets you download eps for $2 each. (NBC shows are no longer available on iTunes.) Stream current episodes free on NBC.com or catch them on the network Fridays. The 2004 movie is $13 on bn.com, where you can also buy the book that started it all, H. G. Bissinger’s exuberant “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream,” now with cover art from the NBC show.